Beating natural disasters with Express

Due to recurring natural disasters and
increasing security threats in India, business continuity and
disaster management have assumed significant importance in the
enterprise community. Businesses today are absolutely cautious about
their operations, and they are trying hard to avoid any downtime in
order to prevent any loss of business opportunity. Hence, corrective
measures need to be taken to ensure business continuity at all times.
Middleware solutions are fast emerging as an answer to these
challenges. There is a growing desire among enterprises and
organizations for affordable middleware solutions that facilitate
uninterrupted operations.

AV Global, one of the leading logistics
solution providers was faced by a similar problem. While the company
did have a robust IT team, which was equipped to handle disaster
management like situation, internally, it decided to look at
third-party service providers, who could do this job for them and
free them to focus on their core business strategies. Though the
company reached out to various service providers about its need, it
finally settled on NEC.

THE NEED

AV Global needed a solution that could
take care of system failures, application failures and OS. Hence, in
order to have zero downtime, the company chose NEC ExpressCluste
software to achieve fast, automatic failover that ensured business
continuity and disaster management. Being a channel- riven company,
NEC selected Delhi-based Comnet Vision for the implementation of the
NEC ExpressCluster software for AV Global Sharing the experience
while working with AV Global, PK Sharma, director, Comnet Vision,
said “We are thrilled to work with NEC in bringing ExpressCluster
high availability solution to the Indian market. We found out that
NEC's ExpressCluster is the perfect HA and Disaster Recovery
software solution, from price-performance and feature-to-feature
comparisons. With more and more companies looking for application and
database availability, data recovery and business continuity, we can
now provide the best solution to our customers.”

AV GLOBAL CHALLENGES

Implementing plans to ensure business
continuity for IT infrastructure is an essential requirement for
organizations today. Downtime of important applications is a costly
proposition and extended downtime can even be fatal. Downtime in
terms of system failures, application failures and OS, result in huge
revenue loss for a corporate. ExpressCluster provides protection
against planned and unplanned failures of AV Globe's IT
infrastructure. It acts as a constant server monitor that detects the
problem and provides automatic recovery to minimize the server
downtime.

Speaking over the networking needs of
AV Global before the NEC solution, Vijay Mehta, MD, AV Global
Corporation said, “To be a premiere logistics company, it is
important to provide quality service to customer, efficiently and
cost effectively. Hence to ensure this, it is critical to have an IT
solution that can meet not only current, but also future IT
requirements. Therefore, we were looking for a solution which could
take care of downtime that resulted from system failures, OS and
application failures.”

THE SOLUTIONS

The solution provided by NEC meets our
expectation, ensures business continuity and protects
mission-critical applications. The company significantly benefited
from this solution. Understanding the need of AV Global, NEC was
confident that ExpressCluster will be the one solution for all its
worries. Speaking on the solution part, Abhilesh Guleria, country
head, IT platform and display solutions bBusiness, NEC India said,
“ExpressCluster family of integrated High Availability (HA) and
Disaster Recovery (DR) software enables fast recovery and continuous
protection of critical applications and data. This software observes
system operations, detecting failures and automatically transferring
operations to a standby server that continues to carry out
application workloads. Unplanned downtime mitigation against
hardware, software, and site failures, and planned downtime
mitigation against periodic hardware and software maintenance tasks
that require system restart are also addressed.” “We are excited
to have Comnet Vision as our partner for delivering NEC
ExpressCluster offerings. We look forward to cater to a broader range
of organizations, needing the benefits of an integrated
High-Availability and Disaster Recovery solution by leveraging the
experienced team of our partner,” said Guleria.

THE OUTPUT

After the deployment of solution, some
of the major benefits AV Global is getting firstly, the logistics
system of AV Global is geared up to take peak workloads without
experiencing downtime. Moreover, AV Global has not experienced a
single interruption of service and has experienced assured business
continuity. We have met the challenges of providing 99.99% uptime to
its business critical 'Logi-Sys' system and centralized database
running on SQL server. Mehta added, “The solution provided by NEC
meets our expectation, ensures business continuity and protects
mission-critical applications. We have significantly benefited from
this solution. We hope to see NEC empowering enterprises with more
innovative technology solutions in future.”